The Tribolium homologue of glass and the evolution of insect larval eyes

Abstract

While non-arthropod orthologues have been found for many Drosophila eye developmental genes, this has not been the case for the glass (gl) gene, which encodes a zinc finger transcription factor required for photoreceptor cell specification, differentiation, and survival. This study reports sequence and expression analysis of the gl orthologue of the flour beetle Tribolium castaneum. A strongly conserved C-terminal zinc finger binding region and a moderately conserved N-terminal transcriptional activation domain characterize the putative Tribolium gl protein. Tribolium gl transcripts were detected in the developing photoreceptors of the larval and adult visual system, the corpora cardiaca, and subsets of cells in the developing brain. This suggests that the gl function of specifying predominantly neuronal cells is strongly conserved. Using gl as a marker for the onset of larval photoreceptor differentiation, we studied the embryonic development of the Tribolium visual system. We find that the Tribolium larval eyes originate at the posterior margin of the embryonic eye lobes as defined by eye-field-specific wingless expression domains. This is consistent with the hypothesis that the larval visual organs (stemmata) of holometabolous insects were derived from and are therefore homologous to the posterior-most ommatidia of the adult retina in primitive nonholometabolous insects.